From
the beginning, Haruki Murakami wanted to get away. He left Kobe for Tokyo, Tokyo for Europe and America. I met him five years ago and was instantly drawn to
the man behind the art. Like Haruki, I am a writer who wanted to escape. For
me, the destinations were reversed: I left America for Europe, then Japan. These days we arrange visits in Tokyo and New York around our itineraries. I landed
in Tokyo three days before this interview; the following day, Haruki boarded a
plane.

HARUKI
MURAKAMI Autor

Nomadic
spirit

Interview
& Text: Roland Kelts

Roland Kelts: What's the value of writing so far from
home? Why have you written so many books overseas?

Haruki Murakami: It's easier for you to
write about your own country when you're far away. From a distance, you can
look at your own country as it really is. I wrote "Norwegian Wood"
when I was on several Greek islands, and in Rome and Palermo, Italy. "Dance, Dance, Dance" was mostly written in Rome, and partly in London. The first
half of "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" was written in Princeton, and
the latter half in Cambridge. And I wrote "after the quake" in the
middle of Tokyo, in an isolated little house owned by my publisher. I guess I
have a nomadic spirit inside me that I can't keep down. Because I know that
each one of those books is connected to each of the places where they were written.
When I think of them, the scenes of the locations where I wrote them comes to
mind.

R: Why did you write those books in those places? Any
reason?

H:
For me, to write fiction is to have a certain kind of relationship with the
imagination. This requires me to escape from daily life, at least to some
extent. That's why I want to go to a different place to do my work. Whether
it's Japan, America or Europe, as long as I have a place where I can
concentrate on my work, I don't think it matters where I am. At the moment,
northern Kauai is my favorite place to write. The fact that it rains a lot in Kauai also allows me to focus more directly on my writing.

R: Does each place affect your writing
differently? Can you see how they colored your imagination in the books?

H: Good question. I don't know, exactly. But I don't
think they really do. Once I face my desk and focus and enter into the world
inside my head, no matter where I am, for me, it hardly really ever matters at
all. It ends up being irrelevant once I enter my imagination, I guess.

R: So, you're not only traveling physically,
you're actually journeying metaphysically into the self, into the imagination. You
told me once that the trip into the imagination is fraught with dangers - like
falling into a well, a metaphor you use a lot in your novels and stories. What
are those dangers?

H: In almost all cases, the objective of a trip is
paradoxical. You ultimately want to return to the starting point safely. Writing
fiction is the same; no matter how far you go, or a how deep a place you go to,
in the end when you finish writing, you have to return to the place where you
started. That is the final destination. However, the starting point to which
you return is never the starting point where you actually started. The scenery
is the same, and the faces are the same, and things placed there are the same. However,
something fundamental has changed significantly. That's what we discover; it's
your discovery. To know that difference is also one of your prime objectives -
or at least to acknowledge that difference.

R: Does that mean that travel and making art are connected
by the trip?

H: Yes, in that sense, traveling and writing
fiction may be a similar experience. You first start by visiting nearby places,
convenient places, places everyone knows about, and then gradually, you start
traveling to more distant, deeper and darker places - even more dangerous
places. Just like a surfer goes farther away from the shore to find bigger
waves. That's probably in the very nature of the traveler and the fiction
writer.

R: Pico Iyer told me that you are the first and
only serious Japanese novelist who can "straddle East and West," and
that your writing is part of what he calls "the global
consciousness." That's pretty high praise. Why do you think a guy from Kobe is being called a global writer?

H: Well, I have in my own heart a world that is
deep, dark and rich. And you, in your heart, have a world that is also deep,
dark and rich. So in that sense, even if I'm living in Tokyo and you are living
in New York, or Timbuktu or Reykjavik, Iceland, it means that we each hold
inside ourselves something that is the same in nature or quality, regardless of
place. And if we trace that quality to a much deeper place, we will discover
that we live in a common world - a world we can just call 'story.'

R: What does that world look like?

H: It's beneath reality, like an underground,
really. And in our underground, there are long tunnels stretching out in all
directions, and if we seriously intend to do so, and also if we are fortunate,
you and I will be able to encounter one another somewhere down there. Actually,
the word "global" is something that I can't really understand, because
we do not necessarily need to be global. We are already what I call
"mutual." If we use the connection of our world called story, I think
that that's enough to keep us connected.

R: One of the deepest connections I felt with you was
when I first read the first page of "Norwegian Wood." The narrator,
Haru, is on a plane landing in Hamburg, Germany, and he's about to have a crisis
connected to the love of his youth. How do you feel when you're on planes?

H: Every time I fly in an airplane, I recall the beginning
of an old Gershwin song called "I Can't Get Started." The lyrics go
something like this: "I've been around the world in a plane / Settled revolutions
in Spainc" So, that's why every time I board a plane, I think of the
Spanish civil war. And when I think of that, I think of Ernest Hemingway. And
when I think of Hemingway, I think of plane crashes. And then, of course, I
start trying not to think about that song anymore. But I can't help it.

R: Planes are boring. Do you write on planes? What
do you do when you're in the act of traveling?

H: Sometimes I take my small DVD player with me
and watch old Jean Luc Goddard movies. As you know, those great old Goddard
movies are hardly ever shown on planes.

R: Okay, you're about to take off tomorrow for
distant lands. I hate asking you this, but here goes: What are your three
favorite overseas destinations?

H: First would be Boston, Massachusetts in America, because it's the most convenient and satisfying city for collecting secondhand
jazz records. Plus, there are many delicious Indian restaurants in Boston - and you can find Samuel Adams draft beer anywhere in town. You can also run the
marathon there - which I've done a few times. In Europe, I really like Stockholm, Sweden. Again, there's a wonderful secondhand record shop there, and I visited
that store every day for three days straight. The owner is a fanatical
collector of great jazz records. And here's something unusual: The passengers
on the subways in Stockholm are almost all talking on their cell phones all the
time. It's very surreal. I also love Sydney in Australia. Although most of the
people there wear boring clothes, because the fashions are really casual and
simple, the food and wine in Sydney is excellent. How mysterious! Also, the
aquarium and zoo in Sydney are both unique and wonderful. Unfortunately,
there's not a single good secondhand record store there. Maybe that will change
in the future.

Haruki
Murakami

Haruki
Murakami was born in Kobe, Japan. He attended college in Tokyo, where he later
opened a jazz bar called Peter Cat. His first novel, "Hear the Wind
Sing," was published in 1979; his fifth, "Norwegian Wood," was a
bestseller in Japan and made him famous. He has lived in Europe, the United States and Japan, and has taught at Princeton and MIT. He is the author of over 30 works of
fiction and nonfiction in his native language, 10 of which have appeared in
English. The eleventh, "Kafka on the Shore," will be published in
2005. A few weeks before this interview, he submitted his forthcoming novel,
which will be published in Japan in September.